This invention relates to a hanger for holding either an individual piece or a group or stack of pieces of limp sheet material, such as textile garment pieces, and for attachment to a conveyor trolley for moving the pieces from work station to work station in a conveyorized garment making plant or the like, and deals more particularly with an improved construction of such a hanger which facilitates the ability at a work station to work on workpieces transported to the station by the hanger without removing such pieces from the hanger's gripping mechanism and without removing the hanger from the trolley.
In the garment making industry, the upholstery industry and other industries involved in making articles from pieces of fabric or other limp sheet material by performing various operations on such pieces, such as seam sewing, hemming, embroidering, buttonholing, appliquing, etc., at different work stations, it is known to convey pieces of work material in different states of completion, and as individual pieces or stacks or groups of pieces, from work station to work station by a conveyor system including overhead rails and switches, trolleys riding on the rails and hangers hanging from the trolleys, with the hangers having some means for releasably holding the workpieces to the hanger. In some operations performed at a work station, for example the operation of cuffing a trouser leg or attaching a pocket to a shirt front, it may not be necessary for the operator to have access to the whole extent of each workpiece and in such case it is possible that when a group of such workpieces is conveyed to a work station by a hanger that the operator can work on them while they remain held by the hanger and trolley. This has certain obvious advantages such as avoiding the need for the work station operator to unload and reload the workpieces from and to the hanger. Also the hanger can conveniently serve as a storage means for the workpieces while at the work station. That is, if the operator removes a stack of workpieces from a hanger, a place usually has to be provided at the work station for holding those workpieces of the stack yet to be worked on at the work station and those pieces of the stack already worked on at the work station, and considerable manipulations of the operator may be required in moving the workpieces between such places and the work station machine itself. If the hanger is designed in accordance with the present invention many of these movements can be eliminated, reduced or replaced by simpler and/or fewer movements, and the space requirements of the work station can also be reduced.
The general aim of this invention is therefore to provide a hanger for use in a conveyor system of the foregoing character which can be used to reliably hold an individual workpiece or a stack or group of such workpieces and which hanger allows the workpieces to be readily unloaded from and reloaded onto the hanger at the work station if necessary or desired, but which also lends itself to the workpieces remaining on the hanger at the work station while the individual pieces are worked, with the hanger further in such case allowing and facilitating the one workpiece worked on at the time to be separated from the rest of the stack and also allowing and facilitating the already worked workpieces to be separated from the yet to be worked workpieces.
Other objects and advantages of the invention will be apparent from the following description and from the accompanying drawings forming a part thereof.